Record Labels Are Recruiting Talent Inefficiently
For decades, A&R reps have found artists the same way: go to shows, trust your gut, call in favors. That worked when the music industry controlled distribution. It doesn't work anymore, and most labels don't know it yet.

Justin Bieber was discovered on YouTube. Not at a venue in Atlanta. Not through a manager's referral. Someone found a kid playing guitar on the internet and signed him. That was 2008. Ten years later, labels are still sending people to concerts.

The internet is now where artists are built. Musical.ly showed us the beginning of this. A teenager in Iowa can build a fanbase of 200,000 people before any label has heard of them. That platform just became TikTok. The next wave is going to move faster than anything the industry has seen. The charts that matter in five years will follow what's happening on the internet today, not the other way around.

Labels are not ready for this. The ones we talked to were still operating as if discovery happens in rooms. We were telling them it happens on screens, and that they were going to fall behind if they didn't change how they worked.

The challenge is not just believing it. It's knowing what to look for. The internet produces too much signal. You can't listen to everything. So most labels default to what they know.

What we built at Asaii was a way to cut through that. Not by counting plays. Play counts are a lagging indicator. By the time a song has 10 million streams, everyone already knows about it.

We focused on a different signal: superfans. One person who genuinely loves an artist and shares them with five friends is worth more than a thousand passive listeners. That sharing behavior, that depth of connection, shows up in the data before the numbers do. It is the earliest sign that something real is happening.

The A&R world has always prized the golden ear. We were building the platinum ear.

A&R is not going away. Relationships still matter. But the job is changing. The next generation of A&R reps are going to be people who can read the internet the way their predecessors read a room. The tools need to catch up.

That is what we were building.